Market Targeting

Market Targeting

Market targeting is essential if you want to get the best value from your marketing spend. And market targeting applies whether you’re offering a B2C or a B2B service – this helps hugely whatever your business.

Why? Broadly there are two options to marketing

You target your marketing on the people most likely to be interested in your services, or

You throw cash everywhere and hope you reach people interested in your services (scattergun marketing)

Clearly A, Market Targeting, is going to let you get a much better return on investment (ROI).

Targeting your markets means you cut out the spending that was completely wasted on people who weren’t in the least bit interested. Now all your spend is being focused just on those who are most likely to buy.

An extra benefit of market targeting is you can now be really specific with your adverts, making them even more effective – you know who you’re aiming at and where you’re most likely to reach them. So, market targeting gets you much, much more from your marketing budget – your spend goes where it should.

OK, So How Do I Target My Markets?

To target your markets we start with customer profiling (you can find out more about customer profiling, here) where we match your services and your own Unique Selling Point (USP) with market segments, picking out the segments that match closest to your ideal – this is your target market. You will probably have more than one if you have different services.

This means we can now precisely define each target market of yours, for each service, rather than one big blob. Once we know your target market segments we can identify each segment’s characteristics – i.e. what their key motivations are, what sort of things they like, where they’re likely to go, search and read.

“Does that mean I ignore other possible customers?” No, but we strongly recommend that you focus on the customers that are easiest to get before you move onto attracting the harder sells – the market segments in the next tier out from your core groups.